I really appreciate the tips and the links to the PS actions. I've never used them before, but I'm going to give it a try this weekend for sure.

I don't know how to describe it but your icons look so like, smooth and mine look sorta grainy to me sometimes. I'm probably not explaining it well, and possibly just imagining it, so don't worry about it! And I wish I had some awesome tips or something to share with you. But I usually don't have a clue what I'm going to do and randomly start fixing colors or slapping on textures. Are all the glowy parts of these icons textures or is it something you like painted on? I've tried doing light blobs or whatever people call them, but they always end up looking terrible.

I find that if I use the crop tool sometimes my icons get a little grainy/over-sharp. I always open a new 100x100 file and drag my pic over when I'm done with my color corrections and shit, then scale it from there. I like that because it lets me adjust the crop later on if I change my mind - and it's easier for me to figure out which crop I want in the first place if I just drag the pic around - I can never tell what it'll actually look like with the crop tool. So maybe that's it? IDK.

Heh, I randomly slap on textures almost every time. Trial and error. I never figure out what I'm going to do before I start. Some of the lights are light effect textures, some are gradients I've set to Soft Light or Lighten, some are white gradients to transparent set on Normal.

When you say light blobs, do you mean the, like, single floaty dot of light right in the middle of the icon? I've seen a grand total of one icon that actually made that work. I don't have it uploaded here; it's a Number Six icon I've got saved away somewhere in one of my icon example folders. I'll have to find it.

Well first, I do always just use the crop tool, and that might be part of why my icons seem so grainy. I've been trying it the way you described (I think) but I'm not sure how much of a differences it's making yet.

And I've been trying out the action and the gradient folder you linked to before - um those are both extremely awesome and useful! I'm such a noob I've never even seen an action thingy before, but once I figured out how to make it work, it was like magic. Thank you so much!

By light blob I more meant like what you have on icons such as 30, 41, 42, which are I guess just gradients. That makes sense, I just have to try to mess with them some more to make mine come out better I think.

Now I'm off to play more with those extremely helpful downloads and all the tips. Thank you again :D

I find I had problems with the crop tool when I cropped to 100x100 with a pretty large picture with no stages in between; to sharpen it to clarity seemed to make it too sharp. Then again, I sometimes have a hard time with sharpness because I make icons on a computer with an old monitor; so maybe what you see as smoothness is just me not sharpening enough!

OMG, the first icon tutorial I read where someone explained how to use actions, it completely changed my life. You mean I don't have to manually duplicate my background and set it to all these different things and adjust levels EVERY SINGLE TIME I make an icon?!

The lights in those icons are textures just set to Screen. Im'ma zip up a folder of the textures I use most an upload it here in a bit; my sister is downloading Sherlock on my computer right now and my bandwidth is at like nothing.